After biding her time, Kamala Harris is in position to take on Trump

In ultra-liberal Provincetown on Cape Cod, Vice President Kamala Harris tried Saturday to galvanize a gathering of Democratic donors and loyalists to shore up a campaign that has been in trouble since Joe Biden’s flawed first televised debate. By Sunday afternoon, the entire race was in turmoil.

Joe Biden sent a message from his home in Delaware in the early afternoon, withdrawing from the race for the White House. The long-awaited moment came in sober, functional language via social media — he was stepping down in the “best interests of my party and country.”

A statement and tributes will follow as the week progresses. But America’s transfers of power move quickly when the pressure is on, and for Kamala Harris, his “extraordinary partner,” this is the moment she can step up and seize a mantle that has been shaken loose by Biden’s health problems.

Until the announcement, Harris had walked an uneasy line between calling for support for Biden and acknowledging an anxious mood, relying this weekend on vague phrasing like “anything worth having takes hard work.”

Figures such as former President Barack Obama (who Biden considers one of his leading opponents) and veteran former Speaker Nancy Pelosi have urged a transition to a younger, fitter candidate. Influential critics pressured him to walk the plank, but it was his decision whether to jump off—though concerns had been mounting about his fitness to run again, from the moderate left in Senator Elizabeth Warren to aides and (presumably family members) all worried that a close race and the strain of a battle with Donald Trump could further damage his health.

Harris’s job since 2020 has been to understudy the president. Now she’s serving as a stopgap, stepping in as the November election approaches and Trump’s alliance with a younger, more intellectually savvy right-winger, J.D. Vance, cements Republican strategy in a populist message.

Few would have imagined until recently that the current “Veep” would find herself in a position where she would be the heir apparent in a presidential race. “A heartbeat away from the presidency” is the traditional core job description, and that often means a beta role, as long as the boss’s heartbeat and other functions remain unaffected. That, however, has taken a political turn in her direction.

Harris, a former California prosecutor and former attorney general by appeal, still sounds that way, according to one of her former colleagues at the San Francisco bar. “She’s instructing, not inviting,” he says. “Notice that she cuts off her hands (when she speaks) in a way that sounds like she’s trying to close the case.”

The counterargument, as Warren, who brought Biden closer than Harris in 2020, puts it, is that a prosecutor might be well-positioned to take on “a convicted felon in Donald Trump.”

The bar is set high for a woman who is smart and determined but often seems to falter in the raw contests of politics and the art of persuasion. She is better at deepening the appeal of the issues she likes to fight about, by highlighting abortion rights, outreach to ethnic minorities and younger voters, but less experienced in the battle for the opinion of undecided voters.

Her final campaign in the 2020 leadership primaries was an exercise in backward momentum—she finished fifth in a poorly run primary. She was given the vice presidency, and few doubt that she did so to both appeal to Biden’s weakest point with younger voters of color and (ironically) to ensure that a thin-skinned president who often chafed under a flashy Obama as vice president wouldn’t be overshadowed now that he was at the top.

She was criticized first for being sent to the southern border without a clear enough plan to deal with immigration, and then for being willing to take heat for a “portfolio full of garbage.” That meant she had to deal with tough issues the president would rather not have on his plate. When Biden offhandedly joked during the pandemic that his COVID adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, “should be in the vice presidential chair,” the dismissive blow didn’t go unnoticed by Harris.

But Biden’s weakness and now-departure make her the candidate who could most easily replace him. Part of that is practical: The ticket has large financial commitments that could be transferred more smoothly to her than to someone else. And while the Cape Cod donor event left many frustrated by her reluctance to signal she was ready for the role, she sensed (correctly) that inheriting the Democratic Party crown by stabbing her boss could be toxic. In the end, others did the work for her.

But few who have heard the drumbeat of her campaign, and who are basking in her popularity with disaffected progressive voters, doubted that she would run to replace him. “Not very fast,” one supporter joked. “More jogging, but she absolutely wants to be the candidate when he runs. After all, she filed for the primary last time — and no one does that unintentionally.”

Both sides of this argument can cite polls as supportive: Donald Trump leads the president by two points and has the same margin over his surrogate. But a series of attacks by leading Republicans suggests they would rather face a faltering Biden than regroup around the lesser-known target of his surrogate.

Not all Democrats are convinced. A significant number, clustered around Pelosi, are concerned about the political downsides of the party elite rushing to crown the vice president. They want to open the field to other candidates, with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as one of the most likely alternatives.

That likely strengthened Harris’ resolve. “She’s had a tough four years, and Biden is a tough boss to serve,” says one of her supporters. “Is she going to step aside for someone (Whitmer) who is completely untested outside of her own state? Absolutely not.”

A passionate but repetitive speaker, Harris often advocates for equality, abortion rights, and social progress using the same phrase about “believing in what can be, unencumbered by what has been.” It’s become a meme that sums up her style and limitations—more workhorse than box office.

Politics at the level of the American Olympics is a realm in which your burdens follow you. What you can achieve is often determined by someone other than you. The person most likely to have thwarted Harris’ ascent to the nomination was the tough, struggling, and ultimately doomed President Biden.

Now he’s gone: the responsibility for what happens next lies squarely with the woman who was his subordinate, but who is most likely the face of the Democratic resistance to a Trump return in the 2024 US elections.

Anne McElvoy is editor in chief of POLITICO and host of the Power Play podcast